TEXAS — Unemployed Texans are set to lose an extra $300 in weekly payments starting Saturday. Gov. Greg Abbott announced last month the state was opting out of federal unemployment benefits for COVID-19.

Abbott cited a thriving economy with employers across the state hiring as reason for ending the program. But critics say it's going to hurt people still at risk from the virus. The change will affect roughly 500,000 Texans.

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“They’re hoping to basically force people back to work,” said Dr. Michael Sadler, an economics and finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “But most economists recognize that out of the pool of unemployed people, there’s probably a very small fraction of the type of people that say, ‘I’m just going to hang on to my benefits and not look for work.’ That has long-term consequences quite often and so this could be painful for quite a lot of people.”

Sadler says the state will likely see some increased economic hardship as a result of this federal benefit going away.

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Meanwhile, the Texas unemployment rate is improving. It was 6.5 percent in May, which is a steep decrease from the all-time high of nearly 13 percent last April. Still, it's double the record low rate of 3.4 percent in May 2019.

“We’ve come a long way…but we’re still a long way off from the trajectory we were on before the pandemic started,” Sadler said. “The U.S. economy is still 7 million jobs short of where we were before the pandemic started and the Texas economy reflects a lot of that same problem.”

Click the video link above to watch our full interview with Dr. Sadler.